Wagging the Dog (When Pedals Come Full Circle)

Honestly, it started as a joke. I’d called on my
friend Mike Piera, the high priest of pedals
known in the effects world as Analog Man, to
suggest that we collaborate on my new line
of pedals for the historically challenged tone
traveler. As an old-school guitarist and builder,
I am a practitioner of plugging directly into
an amp and using the guitar’s controls to alter
volume, distortion, and tone. Occasionally, I’d
employ a boost pedal, wah, or maybe even a
chorus pedal, but only under protest. I decided
that my vintage approach could be the
basis for a new twist on pedal design. My first
offering was a fairly simple affair, just an A-B
box with specific directions on what to insert
before and after. But Analog Man was having
none of it—he didn’t see the humor.

Actually, the idea came to me after chatting
with a client who had called with a question
about stompboxes. The guy was an SRV disciple
who’d heard that I’d gotten a guided tour
of Stevie’s stage rig by the man himself and
wanted to know which effects pedal could
deliver what he called the “SRV clean tone.”
It seemed that my inquisitive caller had many
boxes—distortion, boost, fuzz, delay, chorus,
and so on—but none for the aforementioned
clean sound. After some deliberation, I suggested
a box made by Fender called the
Vibroverb. My caller paused, and then picked
my brain about where to find one. It was
at that moment I imagined an entire line of
switchers for those who were bold enough to
explore the sound of a naked guitar amp.

Analog Man later gave me a DVD entitled
The Art of the Stompbox from The Museum
of Making Music in Carlsbad, California. The
video featured Nels Cline and Henry Kaiser
jamming relentlessly with a huge smorgasbord
of effects pedals. Mike hoped I’d come
to understand the signal chain from his perspective.
Coincidentally, I had started hearing
the phrase “pedal-friendly” being used
in reference to pickups and guitars. In my
newly enlightened state, I set out to understand
what it is that makes a guitar capable
of bonding with these picky little pedals.

As a builder, I’m mostly interested in giving
each instrument character—a voice that can
be heard when you plug the guitar directly
into an amp. I naturally gravitate to building
expressive instruments that stand on their
own, and regard effects as “sweeteners,” as
opposed to the basis for someone’s sound.
In my recent column on choosing pickups,
I revealed how I even consider pickups to
be completely secondary to the guitar’s
voice. But what do other builders think? Do
they ever consider this electronic friendliness
issue when designing their wares? Not
surprisingly, Jason Lollar (who builds both
guitars and pickups) views things similarly
to me. “I want to hear definition and tone
coming out the other end,” he reveals. “I’m
more of a plug-straight-into-the-amp guy.”

Still, he reckons that lower-output pickups
are the key to getting great sounds from
both big pedalboards and high-gain preamp
circuits. “Even metal guys, like Jimi Hazel
and the guys in Metallica, are using lower-output
pickups,” says Lollar. Evan Skopp at
Seymour Duncan concurred that a “sweet,
clean tone is a better platform to get good
results from pedals.”

Greg Timmons at Lollar’s shop brought
it into sharp focus in a way I completely
understood. “I’m a gigging musician,” he
said, “and if I have to rent a backline amp,
I’m going to use my pedalboard to give me
the sound I need. There are pickups that
are highly EQ’d, as opposed to organic and
musical. Those EQ’d pickups don’t tend to
work as well with effects.”

To gain a little more insight, I decided to
test a number of different pickups in a single
guitar to see what made a difference. In
order to facilitate pickup swapping, I threw
together a “mule” test guitar that allowed
me to change pickups from the rear without
having to detune the strings. After a few
swaps, a pattern seemed to emerge that followed
what the pickup guys were saying.

First off, as Timmons suggested, the pickups
with significant midrange bumps seemed to
get lost more quickly when I applied fuzz-type
distortion. Single-coils were very adept
at cutting through delays and other time-based
effects, but their signal-to-noise ratio
made boosting them a hit-or-miss situation
overall. Lower-power actives, like the EMG H
model, worked brilliantly with multiple effects
where the basic sound of the guitar was heavily
modified, but still required some moderate
boosting for convincing, fat lead tones.

Trying to draw a conclusion that relates
directly to guitar design, I reasoned that
a guitar that provides a clear and even
response with lots of string definition might
be the best match for a hot date with a
pedalboard. As I moved between the guitars
in my test stable, this seemed to pan out.
Spruce-topped, long-scale guitars sliced
through multiple fuzz applications without
creating too much sag, while fat, humbucker-equipped
mahogany guitars seemed to
almost create a signal-chain traffic jam.
However, like so many puzzles in the guitar
universe, everything seemed to be a tradeoff.
I wasn’t finding one instrument that covered
it all. Still, I wondered if there was a way to
change the output and resonant frequency of
a pickup designed for pedals without sacrificing
the pure tone and character of a bold,
passive pickup. Like my A-B box comedy-pedal
concept, I’m going to have to work on
that one—and that’s no joke.

Jol Dantzig
Noted designer, builder, and player Jol Dantzig founded
Hamer Guitars, the first boutique guitar brand, in 1973.
Since then, he has worked or recorded with many of the
most talented and famous names in music. Today, as the
director of Dantzig Guitar Design he continues to help
define the art of custom guitar.

Jol Dantzig is a noted designer, builder, and player who co-founded Hamer Guitars, one of the first boutique guitar brands, in 1973. Today, as the director of Dantzig Guitar Design, he continues to help define the art of custom guitar. To learn more, visit guitardesigner.com.